Object-Agent Twins (OATs): Expressive Micro-Agent Avatars for Inanimate Everyday Objects

Anthropomorphism of inanimate everyday objects is a common human strategy for making relationships with the material world more legible, easier to remember, and emotionally resonant. Across psychology and HCI, prior work has shown that even simple artifacts can become meaningful companions when they present cues that invite projection, interpretation, and care. This tendency is particularly powerful in pet-like and toy-like systems. Virtual pets such as Tamagotchi have shown that people readily form attachments to minimal agents that express only sparse needs and personalities. Their success with consumers suggests that companionship does not require realism; rather, it can emerge from lightweight, socially intelligible cues that invite repeated acts of attention and caregiving. This raises an opportunity for HCI: if people are already predisposed to treat everyday objects as though they had dispositions, moods, or needs, then personification may serve as a useful interface strategy for ordinary things in the home, workplace, and greater environment. Perhaps for this reason, we are increasingly seeing tech-savvy individuals create bespoke, one-off, pet-like avatars for different aspects of their lives.

We present our work on a toolkit that enables non-expert users to easily, expressively, and rapidly create small Tamagotchi-like companions for inanimate objects in their everyday lives. However, unlike Tamagotchis that were virtual characters in a virtual environment, ours are Object-Agent Twins (OATs); each companion acts as a miniature personality-bearing proxy for a real-world artifact, expressing simple needs, moods, and behaviors tied to the object’s real-time sensed state. By making object conditions visible through character rather than abstract sensor readings, the system turns ordinary infrastructure into something more socially legible and emotionally engaging, turning e.g., rote maintenance into care and sensor data into expression.

Visit Daehwa Kim's page for source code, demos, and more: https://daehwakim.com/oat/index.html

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Citation Kim, D., and Harrison, C. 2026. Object-Agent Twins (OATs): Expressive Micro-Agent Avatars for Inanimate Everyday Objects. In Proceedings of the 39th Annual ACM Symposium on User Interface Software and Technology (November 2 – 5, 2026). UIST '26. ACM, New York, NY. Best Paper Honorable Mention (1.0% of submissions)

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Object-Agent Twins (OATs): Expressive Micro-Agent Avatars for Inanimate Everyday Objects Anthropomorphism of inanimate everyday objects is a common human strategy for making relationships with the material world more legible, easier to remember, and emotionally resonant. Across psychology and HCI, prior work has shown that even simple artifacts can become meaningful companions when they present cues that invite projection, interpretation, and care. This tendency is particularly powerful in pet-like and toy-like systems. Virtual pets such as Tamagotchi have shown that people readily form attachments to minimal agents that express only sparse needs and personalities. Their success with consumers suggests that companionship does not require realism; rather, it can emerge from lightweight, socially intelligible cues that invite repeated acts of attention and caregiving. This raises an opportunity for HCI: if people are already predisposed to treat everyday objects as though they had dispositions, moods, or needs, then personification may serve as a useful interface strategy for ordinary things in the home, workplace, and greater environment. Perhaps for this reason, we are increasingly seeing tech-savvy individuals create bespoke, one-off, pet-like avatars for different aspects of their lives. We present our work on a toolkit that enables non-expert users to easily, expressively, and rapidly create small Tamagotchi-like companions for inanimate objects in their everyday lives. However, unlike Tamagotchis that were virtual characters in a virtual environment, ours are Object-Agent Twins (OATs); each companion acts as a miniature personality-bearing proxy for a real-world artifact, expressing simple needs, moods, and behaviors tied to the object’s real-time sensed state. By making object conditions visible through character rather than abstract sensor readings, the system turns ordinary infrastructure into something more socially legible and emotionally engaging, turning e.g., rote maintenance into care and sensor data into expression. Visit Daehwa Kim's page for source code, demos, and more: https://daehwakim.com/oat/index.html Download Paper PDF Reference Citation Kim, D., and Harrison, C. 2026. Object-Agent Twins (OATs): Expressive Micro-Agent Avatars for Inanimate Everyday Objects. In Proceedings of the 39th Annual ACM Symposium on User Interface Software and Technology (November 2 – 5, 2026). UIST '26. ACM, New York, NY. Best Paper Honorable Mention (1.0% of submissions)
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